America’s New Atheists
Several books have hit the best-seller lists by preaching that faith is harmful. Has atheism become a new trend in America?
Call it “atheism on the offensive.” The past few years have seen a surge of interest in unbelief. Books on atheism have topped bestsellers lists including The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens.
Don’t Forget to Back Up Your Brain – Scientist Thinks He Can
As any Baby Boomer will tell you, Americans have more information to cram into their memories than ever. Yet, as we age, our capacity for recall grows weaker.
But what if you could capture every waking moment of your entire life, store it on your computer and then recall digital snapshots of everything you’ve seen and heard with just a quick search?
Renowned computer scientist Gordon Bell, head of Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group and founder of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, thinks he might be able to do just that.
He calls it a “surrogate memory,” and what he considers an early version of it even has an official name
General – USNORTHCOM Would Deploy Troops On U.S. Soil
The commander of USNORTHCOM says he’s prepared to obey any order from the president to deploy U.S. troops on American soil in response to a domestic emergency.
“If he were to choose to declare a national emergency, then clearly we at USNORTHCOM would be able to operate in that environment, in response to direct orders from the secretary of defense,” Gen. Victor E. “Gene” Renuart told WND at his Peterson Air Force Base headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.
“But, I’m not sure that would ever be a routine event, and certainly it would be a minority event,” he added in an interview conducted during a simulation of a multi-pronged terrorist attack.
Chinese State TV Tells Viewers – Dump The Dollar
Chinese lunchtime television on Friday gave ordinary people a basic tip on how to play the currency markets: sell the dollar!
A state news program, quoting unnamed “wealth management experts,” told residents with dollar accounts on the mainland to convert their holdings into yuan or a range of other foreign currencies, including the pound and the euro.
The prospect of ordinary Chinese ditching the dollar should be less alarming than reports that have roiled global markets of Beijing diversifying its official foreign exchange reserves.
Mutated Cold Virus Causes 10 Deaths
A mutated version of a common cold virus has caused 10 deaths in the last 18 months, U.S. health officials said Thursday. Adenoviruses usually cause respiratory infections that aren’t considered lethal. But a new variant has caused at least 140 illnesses in New York, Oregon, Washington and Texas, according to a report issued Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC officials don’t consider the mutation to be a cause for alarm for most people, and they’re not recommending any new precautions for the general public.
“It’s an uncommon infection,” said Dr. Larry Anderson, a CDC epidemiologist.
The illness made headlines in Texas earlier this year, when a so-called boot camp flu sickened hundreds at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. The most serious cases were blamed on the emerging virus and one 19-year-old trainee died.
“What really got people’s attention is these are healthy young adults landing in the hospital and, in some cases, the ICU,” said Dr. John Su, an infectious diseases investigator with the CDC.
There are more than 50 distinct types of adenoviruses tied to human illnesses. They are one cause of the common cold, and also trigger pneumonia and bronchitis. Severe illnesses are more likely in people with weaker immune systems
Hamas: Hillary Ticket To Palestinian Victory
Top terror group adviser: Clinton would end ‘unlimited military, political support’ for Israel
Hamas believes Sen. Hillary Clinton, if elected president in 2008, will end President Bush’s “unlimited military and diplomatic support for Israel” and adapt a more “evenhanded” approach toward the Palestinians, says the group’s top political adviser.
Speaking yesterday with WND Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein, Ahmed Yousuf, the top aide to Ismail Haniyeh, the deposed prime minister and Hamas leader in Gaza, said in recorded comments the group heard from “many Americans” that if the Democrats take the White House next year they will implement “drastic changes” to U.S. foreign policy and relations with the Palestinians.
7.7 Quake Strikes Chile
A major earthquake crushed cars, damaged hundreds of houses and terrified people for hundreds of miles around Wednesday. Authorities reported at least two deaths and more than 100 injuries.
The quake, which struck at 12:40 p.m., shook the Chilean capital 780 miles to the south of the epicenter, and was felt as far away as the other side of the continent — in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1,400 miles to the east.
The U.S. Geological Survey calculated the magnitude at 7.7. It was followed by several aftershocks, including three larger than magnitude 5.
Russia To Deploy Missiles To Belarus
Russia may deploy its newest Iskander tactical missiles in neighboring Belarus in response to U.S. plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe, Russian media quoted a senior general as saying on Wednesday.
Asked if the missiles could be deployed in response to the U.S. shield, Major-General Vladimir Zaritsky, head of Russia’s artillery and missile forces, was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass news agency: “Why not? Under the right conditions and with the corresponding agreement of Belarus, it is possible.”
“Any action inevitably causes a reaction,” Zaritsky said. ”And this is just the case with the elements of U.S. air defense in the Czech Republic and Poland.”
MRSA: Fighting The Superbug
It wasnt that long ago that if your child got a staph infection, it was knocked out with a couple of doses of penicillin. Now, penicillin may not work because there’s a form of staph called “MRSA” that has mutated and become resistant to most antibiotics.
As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, its a superbug that used to strike exclusively hospital and nursing home patients. Three years ago, 60 Minutes reported on a then-relatively new community-based MRSA that attacks perfectly healthy people who had not set foot in a hospital.
Thats what were seeing more and more of. New government data estimate that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based MRSA every year. But with the deaths of five school children this year, parents are understandably frantic and want to know what causes it, and how to protect against it. Problem is: there arent many answers.
Pope To Visit U.S. Including White House,Yankee Stadium, U.N. and Ground Zero
November 13, 2007 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
Pope Benedict XVI will travel to the United States for the first time as pontiff next year to meet with President Bush, address the United Nations and visit ground zero, a Vatican official told American bishops Monday.
The pope also will celebrate Mass at the new Nationals Park stadium and Yankee Stadium during the April 15-20 visit to Washington and New York, according to Archbishop Pietro Sambi, Vatican ambassador to the United States.
The announcement comes as the 67 million-member American church is grappling with a priest shortage and an often alienated flock, and is still recovering from the clergy sex abuse crisis. American dioceses have paid more than $2 billion in settlements with victims since 1950.
“It’s a shot in the arm for the U.S. Catholic Church which is enduring one of the most protracted crises in its history,” said Scott Appleby, a University of Notre Dame historian who specializes in religion. He said the Catholic community in the United States “badly needs a renewed sense of its own vitality and its historic legacy in the country.”
Benedict has dedicated his pontificate to fighting secularism and strengthening Catholic faith, and his visit reflects those priorities.
Benedict will convene separate national meetings with Roman Catholic priests, Catholic university presidents and diocesan religious educators, and leaders of other religious groups.
Traditional American Catholics have long complained that Catholic universities have lost their religious identity.
The Archdiocese of Boston, where the abuse crisis erupted in 2002, and bishops from around the country had invited Benedict to visit. But Bishop William Skylstad, head of the bishops’ conference, said the Vatican limited the visit to two cities to “conserve (Benedict’s) energy.”
The visit coincides with the third anniversary of Benedict’s election to succeed Pope John Paul II on April 19, 2005.
John Paul’s five visits to the United States during his pontificate were major events. When he arrived at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1979, a school band welcomed him with the theme from “Rocky.” The late pontiff’s charisma and personal warmth attracted tens of thousands of people to his appearances and buoyed the American church.
Benedict, a theologian, spent more than two decades as the Vatican’s chief orthodoxy watchdog before becoming pope, earning a reputation — considered unfair by his supporters — as a dour enforcer of Catholic teaching.
“I don’t think he is going to make the sort of impact John Paul did. Benedict can’t do it and doesn’t want to do it,” said James Hitchcock, a Catholic historian from St. Louis University. “I think it’s a very different kind of appeal.”
Benedict will also be in the United States during a presidential election year, and his public events could inadvertently become public relations vehicles for candidates or political parties.
Benedict’s pilgrimage to the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York is meant to show “solidarity with those who have died, with their families and with all those who wish an end of violence and in the search of peace,” Sambi said.
However, the site also has become linked in the public mind with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Giuliani, a Catholic, has been married three times and supports abortion rights, and St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke has said he would deny Holy Communion to the candidate.
Chris Duncan, chairman of the political science department at the University of Dayton, a Marianist school in Ohio, said the ground zero visit could hurt Giuliani’s relations with the Republican Party’s important conservative Christian base by “calling specific attention to the fact that he’s living well outside of the faith.”
The pope’s visit will begin with an April 16 reception with Bush at the White House, followed the next day by Mass at Nationals Park and separate meetings with Catholic educators and leaders of other faiths.
Bush met the pope for the first time in June, at the Vatican. The president used that occasion to defend his humanitarian record to the pope, who expressed concern about Iraq.
“President and Mrs. Bush are honored to welcome His Holiness to the White House next April,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for President Bush.
Are Atheists the New Gays?
Richard Dawkins has a bright idea: Atheists are the new gays. Is he joking? Not at all. The bestselling author of The God Delusion has been suggesting for two years now that atheists can follow the example of gays. This would put the atheists last in the line of liberation groups: first the civil rights movement, then the feminist movement, then the gay liberation movement, and now the cause of atheist liberation.
What makes Dawkins want atheists to be like gays? Dawkins explains that gays used to be called homosexual, but then they decided to pick a positive-sounding name like “gay.” Suddenly the meaning of the term “gay” was entirely appropriated by homosexuals. Gays went from being defined by their enemies to defining themselves in a favorable way
Netanyahu Warns Influential Rabbi: Annapolis Dangerous For Israel
The Olmert government is giving everything away to the Arab side in the run-up to this months US-sponsored conference on the creation of Palestine.
All Israel is getting in return is more terrorism.
So warned Likud leader and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu in a meeting with an influential ultra-orthodox rabbi Monday morning.
“They are giving away everything and getting nothing,” Netanyahu – a former prime minister – told Ovadiah Yosef as he compared the current pre-parley developments to those that transpired before the Camp David meeting under US President Bill Clinton in 2001.
During his tenure as the countrys leader from 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu implemented a policy of strict “reciprocity” – refusing to take a second step down the road towards peace with the Arabs before they took their first step.
This approach successfully stymied “Palestinian” terrorism, and during “Bibis” tenure not a single “suicide” bomb attack took place.
Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas political party, reportedly “blessed” Netanyahu but refrained from himself taking a position against the Annapolis meet.
World Religious Leaders Meet With Calls To Unite Faiths
November 11, 2007 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
Leaders of the world’s main religions kicked off an annual inter-faith peace summit here Sunday with calls for a global organization uniting their faiths.
Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Israel’s chief rabbi Yona Metzger and the imam of the United Arab Emirates, Ibrahim Ezzedin, were among those attending the gathering.
“Civilisations don’t dialogue directly, but through those who carry their traditions and cultural values. So we should not speak of a dialogue of civilisations, but a culture of dialogue,” Bartholomew told the opening.
In a similar vein, Metzger proposed a “United Nations of Religions” that would “embrace the heads of religious communities that have a profound influence on their congregations.”
“If we sit down together around one table… surely we could arrive at effective solutions,” he said.
Ezzedin, too, advocated a formal structure linking world religions, saying: “This important grouping of God-fearing people cannot and should not limit itself to processions, conferences and seminars.”
“We need to form a permanent and authorised executive machinery for … executing any decisions we may make,” he added.
The Muslim leader however spoke harshly of “unjustified provocations in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan and … unfair dealings in Palestine” that have prompted “some Muslim individuals and groups (to go) astray and wrong themselves by violent actions.”
He added: “We are dismayed by the behaviour of some great powers who continue to act aggressively against other countries, by means of military occupation under fabricated pretexts… forced regime changes and blunt interference in other countries’ affairs.”
The Sant’Egidio summits are meant to carry on the “spirit of Assisi” and were launched 21 years ago by John Paul II in the birthplace of Saint Francis.
The first summit, dubbed a World Day of Prayer for Peace, was attended by the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and other religious leaders.
The pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stayed away, reportedly out of concern that it put all religions on an equal footing.
Thus the timing of his pastoral visit to Naples has been billed as a “happy coincidence” by Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organisation that has mediated in several world conflicts.
The theme of this year’s peace summit is “A World Without Violence: Faiths and Cultures in Dialogue,” with topics to include AIDS, immigration, the plight of Africa and the quest for peace in the Middle East.
The Sant’Egidio community is the “bridge in this search for common points and continues to work for dialogue in all parts of the world to build peace,” said the Reverend Gijun Sugitani, the supreme advisor of Tendai Buddhism in Japan.
Earlier Sunday, Benedict celebrated an open-air mass as rain fell on pilgrims huddled under umbrellas in Naples’ main square.
Lamenting “the sad phenomenon of violence” in the impoverished city, the pontiff said: “It’s not only a matter of the deplorable number of crimes of the Camorra (mafia), but also the fact that violence tends unfortunately to become a widespread mentality, insinuating itself into the fabric of society.”
All Options On The Table In Facing Iran, says Israel
An Israeli deputy prime minister said on Saturday after a US visit that “all options are on the table” to halt Iran’s nuclear drive, which Israel considers a threat to its existence.
“The strategy for now is one of sanctions, of a united front of nations in that context, and the strategy of declaring without any doubt that all options are on the table,” Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz told public radio. Israel and the United States accuse Iran of pursuing atomic weapons under the guise of a peaceful nuclear energy programme, charges Tehran has repeatedly denied. “I think like others that the option of using military force is the last resort,” Mofaz said, but “it’s clear that the opportunity for a negotiated solution is diminishing”.
Earlier this week after a visit by Mofaz to the United States the two countries agreed to appoint two working committees to hone a joint strategy against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. One committee will deal with intelligence on Iran’s nuclear drive and the other with international sanctions, the chief weapon in an effort to convince Tehran to halt uranium enrichment.
